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Hello again folks!

It's a new month and high time for another development diary. This time, let's talk about barons. In the original Crusader Kings, characters could only hold titles of three ranks; count, duke and king (though these could be called different things in different cultures). Barons existed indirectly in the form of provincial nobility, which, together with the clergy, peasants and burghers, had different power, loyalty and tax values. The player could fiddle around with the power values of the four classes, which would affect the tax rate and the composition of the provincial levy. As it turned out, this was one of the least successful features in the game, because the micromanagement was tedious and did not have enough impact to make it worthwhile. Therefore, in Crusader Kings II, the whole thing has been cut. Instead, each province will have between one and eight named settlements. A settlement is either a castle, city or church, and characters can hold the title to a settlement just like they can to counties and duchies.

Castles are regular feudal holdings, whose barons are normally in fief to the provincial count. Cities are commercial hubs governed by a mayor. Finally, church settlements are run by a Bishop (or Mufti, or similiar.) Like the four classes of Crusader Kings, the three types of settlement provide different types of troop levies and have different tax rates depending on laws. Unlike the class power of Crusader Kings, the rights of churches and cities - and the investiture of their leaders - should be interesting to play around with. (More on this in a later dev diary.)

Barony tier characters are not playable, mainly for performance reasons. (We do not want barons to have courts of their own, with the explosion of characters this would require.) They have a more rudimentary form of AI than playable characters, but will respond to diplomacy and might raise their army in revolt. Another measure to keep the character count down in Crusader Kings II is that you can have your vassals double as councillors (so there is less need for minor nobles to be created by the game).

What about the level of micromanagement - won't all these baronies require more player attention? Well, the whole point of the feudal system is delegation, so the short answer is that for dukes and above; not much. Granted, the dynamic around cities and churches will require more attention, but of the right kind and infrequently. The existence of baronies will also make playing counts a lot more interesting.

I don't have any baronial graphics in particular to show you, but here's a little something that Aerie is working on...

CK2_Diary002_01.png


That's all for now. Don't miss the next dev diary on December 2!


Henrik Fåhraeus, Associate Producer and CKII Project Lead
 
Settlements can be improved with various buildings, provinces cannot. Your demesne size is counted by Settlement, not province, etc.

Does that means that few provinces with one settlement counts the same as one province with many for efficiency?
 
Pretty much the same as in CK. If a king could have, say, 16 provinces in CK, that would be 16 settlements in CKII.

Does this mean that the personal demesne of characters is going to be greatly reduced? Or will you just be able to hold one settlement (the provincial capital) in each province and then have to give the other 7 away?
 
Doomdark this sounds great. Honestly I was rather sceptical about CK-II, but this announcement here might just have gotten me firmly on board. I expect this will all require some fine tuning, but if this is set up flexibly enough it should make for very interesting and certainly more realistic games...

P.S.: @Capitaine Frakas I'd assume that abbey's are just anotehr type of "church". I wouldn't call those bishops prince-bishops either as those bishops who adopted the title of prince usually held possessions on the count or duke tier. of course I wouldn't call those on a castle "secular prince" either, just lord or baron or whatever is culturally appropriate, the same for "burgomaster". Actually that bit about free cities makes me hope that cities in CK-II terms will be relatively rare as most castles eventually had a town or city grow around them but those towns/cities remained under noble rule (the lord or a burggrave/chatelain directly or indirectly via judges/échevins/Schöffen belonging to the local knighthood). But again, all of that is fine tuning, this system sounds fantastic :-D ...
 
As soon as a bishop rule a land, he is a prince-bishop.
Simple bishops do not rule settlements. They just administrate clergymen of their bishopric.

Lords and baron are secular princes.
 
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Does that means that few provinces with one settlement counts the same as one province with many for efficiency?

yes .. if you rule them all as part of your personal demesne :)

@Doomdark

Now I doubt you will be able to hold baronies in lands governed by others?? .. fx. I will not be able to grab a juicy barony title in the land of my count vassal??

Also as a Count with a demesne limit of 3, holding two provinces each with 3 baronies, I could take two baronies in one county and one in the other as my personal domain?? .. and grant the others to my lackeys??

Do I have to grant baronies to courtiers?? .. and who can hold barony titles over castles, churches and cities?? ... can i only appoint ecclesiastical characters as Bishop of a church barony? ... and what id I have one such barony in my province, but no one to fill it ... wAm I then stuck with it until I find one suitable??

If I conquer my neighbour's province, what of the baronies within?? .. are they emptied of rulers, or do the barons stay in power, with me having to find ways to rid myself of them, to make way for my own lackeys?

Can a baron rule more than one barony?
 
yes .. if you rule them all as part of your personal demesne :)

@Doomdark

Now I doubt you will be able to hold baronies in lands governed by others?? .. fx. I will not be able to grab a juicy barony title in the land of my count vassal??

Also as a Count with a demesne limit of 3, holding two provinces each with 3 baronies, I could take two baronies in one county and one in the other as my personal domain?? .. and grant the others to my lackeys??

Do I have to grant baronies to courtiers?? .. and who can hold barony titles over castles, churches and cities?? ... can i only appoint ecclesiastical characters as Bishop of a church barony? ... and what id I have one such barony in my province, but no one to fill it ... wAm I then stuck with it until I find one suitable??

If I conquer my neighbour's province, what of the baronies within?? .. are they emptied of rulers, or do the barons stay in power, with me having to find ways to rid myself of them, to make way for my own lackeys?

Can a baron rule more than one barony?

For all intents and purposes, the Settlement is the new Province. Baronies work almost exactly the same as Counties in CK. There is only one hard limitation; the Count title is directly tied to the capital Settlement in a province. You cannot be the count of a province without also being the Baron of its capital.
 
Nice to see the provincial power system is being reworked. I always ended up just deciding against anyone who disturbed the status quo in CK without really paying attention. I look forward to seeing more of what will replace it.
 
This is exactly what I was hoping for (and wished for in CK1). It should (hopefully) make you feel way more attached to your country/kingdom etc. and will really make playing a count actually interesting now.

Will these settlements be represented on the map? You say you can have from 1 to 8 so how are you going to fit all these in if thats the case? And if it is the case will the map show actual churches/catherdrals, castles and cities?
 
This is exactly what I was hoping for (and wished for in CK1). It should (hopefully) make you feel way more attached to your country/kingdom etc. and will really make playing a count actually interesting now.

Will these settlements be represented on the map? You say you can have from 1 to 8 so how are you going to fit all these in if thats the case? And if it is the case will the map show actual churches/catherdrals, castles and cities?

Most likely only the capital settlement will be represented on the map. This is still not 100% decided though.
 
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These are all good news Doomdark!

I love the idea of the actual Coat of Arms beeing shown on the unit sprites!
 
The player could fiddle around with the power values of the four classes, which would affect the tax rate and the composition of the provincial levy. As it turned out, this was one of the least successful features in the game, because the micromanagement was tedious and did not have enough impact to make it worthwhile.

This is the least of what it would effect. The power levels were major modifiers in lots of events. It was the events that made it bad, not the lack of effect on the tax and levy. There were big effects available from tax and levy composition, but to avoid being clobbered by the nasty events, you had to study the event text files and restrict your changes to those that wouldn't provoke catastrophic events.

What the player needed in CK1 was a way to see what the changes were doing by way of modifying event MTTH and triggers. Make small changes to the powers and you enabled moderately nasty events, make big changes and you enabled catastrophic events. However, short of actually reading the event files you had no way of knowing this.

Is there anything being done in CK2 to avoid this? It plagues all paradox games to some extent and CK1 was particularly bad, because it was heavily dependent on events, and each event had huge quantities of modifiers. Will the player in CK2 be able to tell how they are affecting event modifiers and triggers while actually playing, or will it be necessary to study the event files in order to make sensible decisions?
 
Oh, nevermind. Sounds like a great feature. A lot of people were asking something like this, but I think this is a better idea than anyone presented.

So, are all the different settlements going to have names? Like a church settlement being Oxford Abbey or something like that?
 
It would be cool if settlements would be visible on the map, that reminds me of Knights of Honor where armies could plunder villages and churces in provinces. Would also be nice that when you build a new settlement that you could place them where you want them. A fort close to the border and a city more to the center for protection, but I guess armies would still move from province to province and not all over the map? So then placing them has no strategic value.
 
Very nice feature indeed. I love the idea of being able to appoint a vassal as chancellor, marshall,...

I guess this improves the loyalty of the appointed vassal, right ?
 
This sounds unbelievably hot!
 
This looks pretty great. =D

Things are getting a little vague(to me) on how baronies are represented, though. From what I've read of Doomdark's comments, baronies are sort of the new County, in that they are the lowest form of land ownership, but they are not represented as individually attackable/occupiable 'areas' on the map. So during a war, you would invade the county, and it is assumed the battle is with the capital/count's army(plus any forces the baronies muster), and when you win, the baronies just bow to their new count?

Is that about right?

I admit it'd be cool if the baronies existed a bit more independently, but given that the number of baronies can change in any given county, that'd be pretty much impossible to map out.
 
This looks great! Curious . . . these features are similar to what peeps were asking for in the old "Crusader Kings Wishlist" thread (e.g. http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?258246-Crusader-Kings-2-Wishlist&p=10834966). When you said earlier "I would not say that's our purpose with opening up forums early (the CK2 design is done and we are happy with it.) We just want the community to thrive. However, it is very interesting to see if your ideas are similar to ours, which might indicate whether a feature will be popular or not. Of course, sometimes someone comes up with a new idea that is both brilliant and fits our own design philosophy, in which case we might add it in. We've picked one such from this forum so far." Are the features referenced in this developers diary what you were alluding to at the end of this quotation?

- w
 
Ah, this is looking very interesting!
 
In what group will croatia be in?eastern or western.Will there be a ban title(Croatian title similar to duke,bans of slavonia,bosnia etc.)